Gitanos Expulsado in A Minor

I just finished a wee bit of final mixing on this one.. if anyone cares.. or doesn't.. *G*

That's freakin to kool for school 8) 8) 8) Did you do the fiddle and clarinet? Unlike Rush Limbaugh...you do have talent on loan from God :D

Thanks Dawg..

The violin is a edited keyboard performance.. at the end of this post I'll post the madness to my method..

Other than that, yes I played everything with the exception of the drums, which are real, and I did meagerly arranged them, but had little control over them..

Tracks run as follows..

The music instruments were all recorded from a Cad Large Condenser mic (35 bucks at the pawn shop.. ) plugged directly into my Yamaha PA (channel ran completely flat, just for power) ran directly into the Behringer A/D box (30 bucks) ran directly into the computer.

The tracks ran roughly this way, and in this order and in this pan...

1. Drums (center Stereo)
2. Bass (cheesy electric Ibanez)
3. Center Guitar, Dobro (bottom line Regal)
4. Right, Dobro
5. Left, Nylon (yamaha classical)
6. Right/Center Nylon
7. Left/Center Dobro
8. Violin (synthetic) Slightly Left (when possible)
9. Clarinet .... mostly right

Everything was recorded direct and no color.. after everything was laid down I EQ'd just about each track individually.. mostly just to pull noise out of some mid bands from the cheesy mic which is a bit noisy when amplified by the addition of it's self at times 7 times/tracks..

I compressed AND limited the Bass fairly heavily so it would sit well without being too dynamic because I laid it down secondly before the guitars so most dynamic interplay is lost anyways.

Used some noise reduction on the lead guitar.. and compression and limiting, just a tad, but I wanted it to bring up some of the softer runs while squelching some of the louder 'ooops' notes.. the lead was noisy enough, and needed enough reduction that you can hear it in the tone of the lead.. it has that eq'd out almost filterish twang.. unfortunate but what the heck.

I added reverb to the Clarinet.. and to be honest I don't remember if I added any to the lead guitar.. I know I played with it off and on, but can't remember if I was digging on the actual tone enough or not..

(I'm not going to erase the above, but I just remembered).. on the lead guitar I did the ol duplicate the track, and then advance one track a bazillionth of a second, and then pan one track extreme left, and one track extreme right.. so there is no reverb, but delay..

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Violin,,,

The violin was created this way (hold on to your hat, here we go)..

First step was to perform it on the keyboard. So I played the music to that point, and 'performed' in real time the violin.

At that point I open the midi information from the performance and then play it back and make edits as I go.. the process can take 20 or more minutes... just cleaning up and re-organizing notes to make it sound more violinish.. like taking a note and retarding it just a second and enveloping in a volume swell. Anyways.. the performance got edited...

So now I had an ok performance, but it sounded like a keyboard violin..

So I duplicated the same track 6 times.. (it's still in midi info, so I can assign any sound to it) and assigned each track a different violin patch.. I have a collection of sounds over the years I have picked up.. 4 were VST and 2 were actually old sondfonts.. so each track has a different violin.. one attacks the strings a bit slower, one has more vibrato, one has more gliss.. etc etc..

At this point you start cutting.. I need one continuous line of viloin but I have 6 tracks .. so basically you find the best sound for the second (literally.. I can use one patch for seconds, or have up to 10 edits in the matter of 2 seconds).. and cut the others away..

After this point you have 6 chopped up tracks where you always have at least one sound coming from.. so now you need to draw in volume envelopes and work pans because the source violin is now from 6 different sources, not all recorded equally or in the same space...but they need to be.. close as possible anyways..

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At this point you are wore out.. you start to think about starting to drink again.. so you just say '#@&^@# it' and you slap some reverb on that #$^& and call it a day..

Thanks for asking.. I love talking shop..

Sounds great, and thanks for spelling out all your tricks and techniques for your recording/mixing efforts. 8)